[conspire] bayPIGgies meeting July 12: Natural Language Toolkit

[jim stockford]

> ( a few of you may be expecting the second part of Newbies'
> Night, Alex Martelli's presentation of Python for Programmers,
> Part 2--this has been moved to the August 9 bayPIGgies
> meeting for the reason that the Natural Language Toolkit
> developers are in the area only for another couple of weeks. )
>
>
>> Thursday, July 12, 2007
>> Location: Google
>>
>>
>> Agenda-----------------------------
>>
>>
>> ..... 7:30 PM ...........................
>> General hubbub, inventory end-of-meeting announcements,
>> any first-minute announcements.
>>
>>
>> ..... 7:35 PM to 8:45 PM ................
>> Topic: The Natural Language Toolkit (NLTK)
>> Steven Bird, Ewan Klein, and Edward Loper
>>
>>    Most human knowledge--and most human communication--is
>> representedand expressed using language.
>>    Language technologies permit computers to process human
>> language automatically; handheld computers support predictive
>> text and handwriting recognition; web search engines give
>> access to information locked up in unstructured text.
>>    By providing more natural human-machine interfaces and
>> more sophisticated access to stored information, Natural
>> Language Processing has come to play a central role in the
>> multilingual information society.
>>    The Natural Language Toolkit is a suite of open source
>> Python modules, data sets, and tutorials supporting research
>> and development in Natural Language Processing.  NLTK
>> includes some 50k lines of Python, a 380-page book
>> (80% complete), and 300Mb of test data, all freely
>> downloadable from http://nltk.org/index.php.
>>    In this presentation, the developers of NLTK will introduce
>> the field of Natural Language Processing, demonstrate the
>> main features of NLTK, and describe ways for the Python
>> community to participate in the ongoing development effort.
>>
>> About the presenters:
>>
>>    Steven Bird is Associate Professor in Computer Science at the
>> University of Melbourne in Australia, and Senior Research Associate
>> in the Linguistic Data Consortium at the University of Pennsylvania,
>> specializing in R&D on models and tools for large databases of
>> annotated text.  Steven edits the book series "Cambridge Studies in
>> Natural Language Processing," and was recently elected president of
>> the Association for Computational Linguistics.
>>
>>    Ewan Klein is Professor of Language Technology in the School of
>> Informatics at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland.  He has
>> also been Research Manager for the Natural Language Research Group
>> of Edify Corporation, Santa Clara, and was responsible for spoken
>> dialogue processing. Ewan was the founding Coordinator of the
>> European Network of Excellence in Human Language Technologies.
>> He has lead numerous academic-industrial collaborative projects,
>> most recently in biological text mining.
>>
>>    Edward Loper is a doctoral student at the University of
>> Pennsylvania, conducting research on machine learning in natural
>> languageprocessing.  In addition to NLTK, Edward has helped develop
>> othermajor packages for documenting and testing Python software,
>> epydoc and doctest.
>>
>>
>> ..... 8:45 PM to 9:00 PM ................
>> Mapping/Random Access
>>
>> Mapping is a rapid-fire audience announcement of topics the announcers
>> are interested in.
>>
>> Random Access follows immediately to allow follow up individually on
>> topics of interest.
>>
>>
>> ..... The August Meeting  ................
>> The August meeting is Newbies' Night, Part 2, presenting the second
>> half of Alex Martelli's Python for Programmers talk.
>>